Paul and Peter Agree

Now about the backing of Peter and the rest of the apostles. Paul writes that “fourteen years afterward he went up to Jerusalem” to confer with them about the rule he had been following in his preaching of the good news — in case he had been running all those years, and was running still, for nothing. Which is exactly what it would have come to, of course, if his own preaching fell short of their pattern. That is how badly he wanted the approval and the support of the very men you want taken, whenever it suits you, for allies of Judaism. When he says that “not even Titus was circumcised,” he shows us for the first time that circumcision was the only question yet raised in defense of the law by the men he goes on to call “false brothers smuggled in.” Those people went no further than insisting that the law should continue. Beyond any doubt they still sincerely believed in the Creator. They did twist the good news in their teaching, but not by any tampering with Scripture that would let them erase the Creator’s Christ. They twisted it by holding on to the old order so tightly that the Creator’s law was not shut out. And so he writes: “Because of false brothers smuggled in, who slipped in to spy out the freedom we have in Christ, so that they might bring us into slavery — to whom we did not give way in submission even for an hour.” [a]

Just attend to the plain sense of the thing and to the reason behind it, and the way the passage has been twisted will be obvious. He says first, “Neither was Titus, who was with me, being a Greek, compelled to be circumcised,” and only then adds, “and that because of false brothers smuggled in,” and so on. He is beginning to give his reason for acting in exactly the opposite way, showing us why he did something he would neither have done nor told us about, if the thing that pushed him into it had not happened. But I want you to tell me this. Would they have yielded to the submission that was being demanded of them, if these false brothers had not crept in to spy out their freedom? I think not. They gave way as far as they did because there were people whose weak faith had to be taken into account. Belief still at its beginnings, still undecided about keeping the law, deserved that much allowance — at a time when even the apostle himself half suspected that he might have run, and might still be running, for nothing.

So the false brothers who were spying on Christian freedom had to be blocked from getting that freedom under the yoke of their own Judaism — blocked before Paul had found out whether his labor was wasted, before the men who were apostles ahead of him gave him the right hand of fellowship, before he took up the work of preaching to the nations by the arrangement they made with him. He therefore made a concession, as he had to, and for the time being. That is why he had Timothy circumcised, and why he brought the Nazirites into the temple; both incidents are told in Acts. You can see they are true from the way they agree with the apostle’s own account of himself: how “to the Jews he became a Jew, to gain the Jews, and to those under the law, as under the law” — and so here too with the men who came in secretly — and, last of all, how “he became all things to all men, to gain them all.” Since the circumstances call for that reading and no other, nobody will refuse to admit that the God Paul preached, and the Christ he preached, were the God and the Christ whose law he was setting aside the whole time. He allowed the law where the times required it, but he would have had to abolish it outright and at once if he had been publishing a new god. Peter and James and John, then, were right to give Paul the right hand of fellowship and to agree on a division of the work, Paul going to the nations and they to the circumcised. Their agreement “to remember the poor” was in complete keeping with the Creator’s law, which cherished the poor and the needy, as we showed in our remarks on your Gospel. So it is certain that the question at issue simply concerned the law — and equally plain how much of the law it was convenient to have kept.

Paul does censure Peter for not walking straight according to the truth of the good news. Of course he blames him. But it was purely for inconsistency over what he ate, which he varied according to the company he was in, “because he was afraid of those of the circumcision.” It was not on account of some crooked opinion about another god. If a question like that had come up, others would have been “opposed to their face” as well, by a man who did not spare even Peter over the comparatively small matter of his wavering conduct. But what is it that the Marcionites want us to believe here? For the rest, the apostle must be allowed to finish his own sentence, where he says that “a man is not counted righteous by the works of the law, but by faith” — faith, that is, in the same God to whom the law also belongs. He would certainly not have taken the trouble to sever faith from the law if a difference of god had existed, since a difference like that would have produced the severance all by itself. He was right, then, to refuse to “build up again the structure he had pulled down.” The law did have to be pulled down, and from the moment John “cried in the wilderness, Prepare the ways of the Lord,” so that the streambeds and the hills and the mountains should be filled in and levelled, and the crooked and rough roads made straight and smooth. In other words, so that the hard places of the law might be turned into the easy going of the good news.

He remembered that the time had come which the Psalm spoke of: “Let us break their bonds apart and throw their yoke off us.” It had come from the moment when “the nations were in an uproar and the peoples plotted in vain,” when “the kings of the earth stood up and the rulers were gathered together against the Lord and against his Christ” — so that from then on a person might be counted righteous by the freedom of faith and not by slavery to the law, “because the righteous man will live by his faith.” Habakkuk the prophet said this first, but here you have the apostle confirming the prophets, exactly as Christ did. So the object of the faith by which the righteous man will live is the very God to whom the law belongs as well — the law by doing which no one is counted righteous.

And since the curse is found in the law and the blessing in faith, both alike, you have both conditions laid out by the Creator himself: “Look,” he says, “I have set a blessing and a curse before you.” You cannot make out two authors from the fact that there are two things; the difference is itself put forward by one and the same author. Why “Christ was made a curse for us” the apostle explains himself, and in a way that helps our side, since it comes of the Creator’s own appointment. But it does not follow at all, from the Creator’s saying long ago, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree,” that Christ belonged to some other god and was on that account already accursed in the law. How could the Creator have cursed in advance somebody he knew nothing about? And why should it not suit the Creator better to have handed his own Son over to his own curse, than to have handed him over to the curse of that god of yours — and handed him over on behalf of a man who is a stranger to that god at that? If this appointment of the Creator’s about his own Son strikes you as cruel, it is just as cruel in the case of your god. And if in your god it stands to reason, it stands to reason just as well in mine — better, in fact. It would be far easier to believe that the God who once set both a blessing and a curse before man had provided a blessing for man through the curse of Christ, than that this was done by a god who, on your own showing, never at any time pronounced either one.

“We have received, therefore, the promise of the Spirit,” as the apostle says, “through faith” — that same faith by which the righteous man lives, and in line with the Creator’s own purpose. What I am saying is that the God who is the object of faith is the God who sketched out the grace of faith beforehand. And when Paul also adds, “for you are all children of faith,” it becomes clear that what the heretic’s diligence rubbed out was the mention of Abraham’s name. For Paul declares that it is by faith that we are “children of Abraham,” and having mentioned Abraham he went on to call us “children of faith” as well. But how are we children of faith, and of whose faith, if not Abraham’s? “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness”; and for that reason he deserved to be called “the father of many nations.” We, who are even more like him in believing God, are counted righteous just as Abraham was, and by that we come to have life as well, since the righteous man lives by his faith. So it works out that, just as in the earlier passage Paul called us “sons of Abraham,” because in the matter of faith Abraham is our common father, so here he named us “children of faith” too — for it was on account of Abraham’s faith that the promise was made that he should be the father of nations. And as for his calling faith away from circumcision: was he not aiming precisely at making us children of the Abraham who had believed while his flesh was still untouched?

In short, faith in one of two gods cannot possibly let us into the other one’s arrangement — cannot let that arrangement count righteousness to men who believe in the first god, or make the righteous live by him, or declare the nations his children through faith. An arrangement of that kind belongs entirely to the God by whose appointment it had already been made known in the call of this same Abraham, as the plain sense of the words proves beyond argument.